Fade in: to Murder: A Case of Ego Laundering Through Truth Divining

In Declan Smith’s Fade in: to Murder the heroine is a character who has really mastered the key to hijacking a situation for oneself. She is (playing) the savant detective: eagle-eyed, ferret-nosed, and an ego that barely leaves room for the body to exist in the periphery. 

Usually reserved for white men, here the character is doused in layers of self-reflexivity. Grace Goodman (Sherice Banton) is a black woman, and to spice up its side-eye even more, she is not a detective but a struggling actress. As if on the snap of the clapperboard, she has stepped into a self-written, self-produced, self-directed role. 

The plot is fairly straightforward: they are at a small film festival; everyone in attendance is part of the industry. A director (Simon Crudgington) gets a mysterious phone call calling out his stolen script. A murder follows. Throw in a this-changes-everything twist near the end, a couple of police officers to do the symbolic, and ta-da: the perfect vehicle to show off a genius at work. 

The role is tedious, and that is the point. If it weren’t, the film would not show us the murder already, would not make the stakes low and loose enough to be practically irrelevant. The whole point is to lay bare the megalomania of such modern savant truth-seekers, where no other truth is more important than the staging of the savant’s gifts. Banton is fun to watch as she leaves just a whiff of irony in the performance.  Too much, and it would not have been as zingy. Too little would have turned out the same done and dusted plot dressed in a different garb. 

The writing helps (as does the background score). The first dramatic walk to the criminal, the one that would lead to the assured discovery of some damning clue, is frustrated—humbled, even—by the demands of playing nice in the face of professional precarity. But what claim do tiresome questions of the next gig and the next paycheque have on Grace’s mind when there is a monologue to build up to, to deliver with the unquestionable flourish of one who sees and knows everything. 

Go in for the procedural, stay for the pleasures of well-earned irony. 

Watch Fade In: To Murder Short Film